Researchers at the University of Illinois have developed a membrane-penetrating nanoneedle for the targeted delivery of one or more molecules into the cytoplasm or the nucleus of living cells. In addition to ferrying tiny amounts of cargo, the nanoneedle can also be used as an electrochemical probe and as an optical biosensor.

Stony Brook University will be home to the new Northeastern Chemical Energy Storage Center (NOCESC), which involves a team of experimentalists and theorists at SBU (Clare P. Grey, Director and Peter Khalifah, in the Chemistry Department), Brookhaven National Laboratory (Jason Graetz and Xiao-Qing Yang), Rutgers, Binghamton University, MIT, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, U. Michigan, Argonne National Laboratory, and U. Florida.

A comprehensive study of old and new manufacturing processes, from machining metal to making carbon nanofibers, shows that the more advanced technologies are less efficient in their use of energy and materials per kilogram of output.

Self-cleaning walls, counter tops, fabrics, even micro-robots that can walk on water -- all those things and more could be closer to reality thanks to research recently completed by scientists at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL) and at Japan's RIKEN institute.

A material just six atoms thick in which electrons appear to be guided by conflicting laws of physics depending on their direction of travel has been discovered by a team of physicists at the University of California, Davis.

EU-funded scientists have developed a new, non-viral way of getting genes into a cell. The technique appears to avoid the side-effects, such as cancer, which can occur when viruses are used to smuggle genes into a cell.

In future, cartilage, tendon and blood vessel tissue will be produced in the laboratory, with cells being grown on a porous frame, such as non-wovens. A new software program helps to characterize and optimize the non-wovens.